So it was John
It is life and enough to start evolution into more complex organic systems (like us).
IAC 2016 - Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species
- Thread starter Caine
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So it was John
It is life and enough to start evolution into more complex organic systems (like us).
Caine
Hardcore Member
With all due respect, please take the evolution vs religion argument somewhere else.
I enjoy some decent religion bashing every once in a while as well, but this is not the place.
I enjoy some decent religion bashing every once in a while as well, but this is not the place.
ible
professional vim user
well, it's bound to appear (religion / philosophy) when talking about the heavens... i mean stars...
with our current understanding of physics, it's hard to see us ever leaving the solar system (without moving some fragment of our consciousness into computers). but we thought we understood physics a little over a hundred years ago, and then quantum mechanics and relativity happened. (relativity being, of course, the very thing that would make it hard to go anywhere.) we might get another quantum leap forward soon, though, so it's good to keep an open mind. it almost seems as if the universe was designed for us to incrementally understand it so well
. i mean, just imagine if the hard theories like relativity and quantum mechanics did not "degrade" nicely into easier models like Newtonian physics...
at any rate, i'd like to say we could make it off the earth, but we may destroy ourselves first...
with our current understanding of physics, it's hard to see us ever leaving the solar system (without moving some fragment of our consciousness into computers). but we thought we understood physics a little over a hundred years ago, and then quantum mechanics and relativity happened. (relativity being, of course, the very thing that would make it hard to go anywhere.) we might get another quantum leap forward soon, though, so it's good to keep an open mind. it almost seems as if the universe was designed for us to incrementally understand it so well
. i mean, just imagine if the hard theories like relativity and quantum mechanics did not "degrade" nicely into easier models like Newtonian physics...at any rate, i'd like to say we could make it off the earth, but we may destroy ourselves first...
kuru
Laptop und Trachtenjanker
I discount neither the infinitesimally small chance, nor the purposeful nudge of something altogether different.
tigerroast
YOUNG VORHEES
Well, let's put that claim into perspective. If evolution is a lie, then the best minds of multiple eras had, quite literally, hundreds of years up to this point to prove it.
He's not the one you should be thinking about.
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[...]so it's good to keep an open mind. it almost seems as if the universe was designed for us to incrementally understand it so well
Noooooo....don't do that. We have always understood things better gradually over time, as tech and theories were being invented and built upon. That whole "finely-tuned" thing is to denote how, in order for us to exist as we do, the universe must meet certain requirements and fall under certain parameters.
If not, then we'd simply exist in a different form. Maybe it wouldn't be safe enough to leave liquid water and our ancestors adapted to live in the ocean. Maybe we'd be salient dolphins except deadlier. Idk. Humans are finely-tuned for the universe, not the opposite.
The best theories are the most elegant.
Well, we're all gonna die anyway, apparently. Just not in the way the Good Book tells us.
FlapJack
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The Good Book is The Bible.
Are we afraid to call it what it is? Are we afraid to reference it and live our days by reading it? If you're afraid to acknowledge it, then there is something wrong. Let Islam run rampant and see what happens. OPEN YOUR EYES
...also, I was going with @Caine on this, I was done....but then I read some goofy stuff. So I retort.
Are we afraid to call it what it is? Are we afraid to reference it and live our days by reading it? If you're afraid to acknowledge it, then there is something wrong. Let Islam run rampant and see what happens. OPEN YOUR EYES
...also, I was going with @Caine on this, I was done....but then I read some goofy stuff. So I retort.
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ible
professional vim user
the only thing to fear is fearing muslims (or their religion). or maybe fear itself... i suppose the latter encompasses the former, though i only just realized the Gödelian nature of the latter.
or, for a more biblical approach (for FlapJack, not targeted at anyone else), don't fear those who can only destroy the body...
or, for a more biblical approach (for FlapJack, not targeted at anyone else), don't fear those who can only destroy the body...
FlapJack
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You've only just realized this? Well, you must live a truly unique and sheltered life. I really need to stop thinking about these things. I love what I love. The world has made me a criminal for saying what I do.
I hate both these plans of colonizing space and those who believe God will save them.
Why ? They are all justifying "solutions" that are letting us keep on destroying our living environment (the planet). The planet is finite, we are stuck on it and are mortals.
Responsibility should make us plan and prepare a sustainable future here. The fossile energy that is left should not be wasted to keep increasing wealth of a few but used inteligently to prepare the coming decenies.
Why ? They are all justifying "solutions" that are letting us keep on destroying our living environment (the planet). The planet is finite, we are stuck on it and are mortals.
Responsibility should make us plan and prepare a sustainable future here. The fossile energy that is left should not be wasted to keep increasing wealth of a few but used inteligently to prepare the coming decenies.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm a greeny myself, but this doesn't solve problems like asteroids, dying sun, alien invasion, etc...
It doesn't matter whether you call it the wrath of god™ or just bad luck.
S
sulu
Guest
The Wikipedia article I linked says, that the collision probably happened 4.31 billion years ago. IIrc (just as with biology, I'm no expert in geology) at that time Earth's solid crust was just formed. So the basic structure of the Earth with a more or less solid core and a liquid mantle should have been there.
Also, the path of the Moon (or rather the debris that later formed it) after the collision of Theia with Earth isn't linear. It's a ballistic trajectory, like when you throw a ball or fire a gun. So at first the distance grew quickly but Earth's gravitation slowed this process down more and more. The initial energy was just big enough for the Moon to eventually escape Earth's gravity field. This process is still going on.
Caine
Hardcore Member
This is not necessarily true. Colonizing space could lead towards accelerated sustainability.
Why? Because the scarce resources such a colony has to deal with will create an immediate necessity for it to be sustainable.
The technology developed and lessons learned in that process could subsequently be exported back to Earth.
Grench
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If we're ever going to go interstellar, it would have to be in a multi-generational craft. The distances, measured in light years, dictate this.
It would be a gigantic undertaking requiring manufacture in a reduced gravity environment, likely using either lunar or asteroid(s) for materials to save bringing up material through the Earth's gravity well. Alternatively, if we were to use a comet 'in flight' for construction materials the materials themselves would already have much of the later needed momentum.
To have the needed volume for human consumables WITH redundancies for a viable settlement population of 10,000 people over the 50+ generations, this 'craft' would need to be roughly the size and complexity of Manhattan Island (Part of New York City).
Constructing this in space could take 100+ years if humanity could cooperate and emphasize it enough. Frankly, to have the adequate emphasis we would have to spot a 100+ year out planet sized Earth ending object hurtling our way or something along those lines.
Gravity assist can be used for both adding and removing momentum. This takes a lot of time though. After construction, the 'craft' could spend 100 years or more bouncing around the Jovian planets and the sun, gathering momentum - much like the Voyager probes did. On the multi thousands of years that the 'craft' will be traveling, though, this time for acceleration will be a small portion of the travel. It would not need to be populated during most of this acceleration time as smaller ships could be accelerated to 'catch up' several generations into it's acceleration phase. Their mass would be a rounding error compared to the mass of the 'ship'.
The best tech we have so far for the piloting thrust would likely be nuclear powered ion engines. The 'ship' will also need a substantial amount of power to generate enough magnetic field to act as a radiation shield - at least until it's out of the Sun's influence.
The combined construction, acceleration, travel and deceleration time required would be something in the 1000+ year range. This does not include what has to happen once we have this then gigantic space station orbiting a planet around a 'nearby' star. Humans started to log/write (recorded history) around 3500 years ago - a blip in cosmological time scales.
If we're going to have any reliable chance to 'save the species', then we will need dozens of these 'craft' packed full of people who would effectively sign on as progenitors of dozens of generations 'stuck in space' - which could be a hypothetical Hell worthy of Dante. The only way I see humanity ever cooperating to the necessary level on Earth is if the prospects for Earth and the solar system on-whole is known and substantively worse.
It would be a gigantic undertaking requiring manufacture in a reduced gravity environment, likely using either lunar or asteroid(s) for materials to save bringing up material through the Earth's gravity well. Alternatively, if we were to use a comet 'in flight' for construction materials the materials themselves would already have much of the later needed momentum.
To have the needed volume for human consumables WITH redundancies for a viable settlement population of 10,000 people over the 50+ generations, this 'craft' would need to be roughly the size and complexity of Manhattan Island (Part of New York City).
Constructing this in space could take 100+ years if humanity could cooperate and emphasize it enough. Frankly, to have the adequate emphasis we would have to spot a 100+ year out planet sized Earth ending object hurtling our way or something along those lines.
Gravity assist can be used for both adding and removing momentum. This takes a lot of time though. After construction, the 'craft' could spend 100 years or more bouncing around the Jovian planets and the sun, gathering momentum - much like the Voyager probes did. On the multi thousands of years that the 'craft' will be traveling, though, this time for acceleration will be a small portion of the travel. It would not need to be populated during most of this acceleration time as smaller ships could be accelerated to 'catch up' several generations into it's acceleration phase. Their mass would be a rounding error compared to the mass of the 'ship'.
The best tech we have so far for the piloting thrust would likely be nuclear powered ion engines. The 'ship' will also need a substantial amount of power to generate enough magnetic field to act as a radiation shield - at least until it's out of the Sun's influence.
The combined construction, acceleration, travel and deceleration time required would be something in the 1000+ year range. This does not include what has to happen once we have this then gigantic space station orbiting a planet around a 'nearby' star. Humans started to log/write (recorded history) around 3500 years ago - a blip in cosmological time scales.
If we're going to have any reliable chance to 'save the species', then we will need dozens of these 'craft' packed full of people who would effectively sign on as progenitors of dozens of generations 'stuck in space' - which could be a hypothetical Hell worthy of Dante. The only way I see humanity ever cooperating to the necessary level on Earth is if the prospects for Earth and the solar system on-whole is known and substantively worse.
S
sulu
Guest
The general idea of just hitch-hiking on an interstellar asteroid sounds quite intriguing!
But I see two problems:
1. How do we find one?: With our current telescopes we can barely find medium planets on stable orbits in other solar systems. How do we find tiny asteroids in interstellar space? and even if we find them, how do we predict their courses? Even if we might predict when they come to us it is much harder to predict where they will be going because small uncertainties in trajectory prediction will add up to huge errors on an interstellar scale. Significantly changing the course of these asteroids seems unrealistic to me, so we should know in advance that it will go roughly in the right direction.
2. The time scale: Although interstellar asteroids would have to be incredibly fast to escape the Sun's gravity in the first place, they'd still be very slow in interstellar dimensions. So we'd need a lot of generations on that generational craft. I guess we'd be talking about hundreds of thousands or even millions of years of total travel time. That's a lot of "wasted" generations uselessly consuming resources. Also people tend to get "bad ideas" (see Dante) when they have nothing useful to do. Who knows what technologies might be available in a hundred years.
I have no idea how to do that, but I'm beginning to think that at that scale (even evolution would have to be taken into account), Earth itself should be the spacecraft we propel into another solar system.
But then again, a hundred years from now, things might look totally different than now. Jules Verne wrote about traveling to the Moon about a hundred years before we actually got there. He did what (hard) SciFi authors often do. He extrapolated from the technology he knew. So he sent his astronauts in a bullet that was shot by a giant cannon, because he didn't imagine what the rockets he knew as inferior weapons would evolve into.
Actually, you need a magnetic field all the time. There seems to be quite some radiation in intertellar space. The Voyager probes are just transitioning from the Sun's Heliopause into its "Bow Shock", which both are interference effects of the Sun's radiation with some other fields.
Just a short film tip:
Everybody who follows this thread has probably heard of the 2015 film "The Martian". [1] If you liked this film for its realistic approach (as far as SciFi can be realistic), then you might also like the 2013 film "Europa Report" [2] that deals with the manned mission to the Jupiter moon Europa. It gets a bit of an "Outer Limits" touch towards the end, but for the most par it's pretty much "hard" SciFi (for a film).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Report
levi
Still fresh, damnit!
A generation ship is one way to cover the vast expanses between solar systems, but alternatives include the cryosleep chambers from Alien, or Red Dwarf's stasis chamber, which might mean ships have to be less well shielded and massive, and thus expensive to get going at any speed. Of course, whether either of these sci-fi schemes have any bearing on reality remains to be seen, and I guess at least the generation ship concept is theoretically possible with today's tech (ignoring any cultural or political problems you'd have in making one).
S
sulu
Guest
Afaik although we know in principle how cryosleep might work on a scale of a complex organism like a human, there are some practical problems we haven't solved (yet). One problem is, that when you put a cell into cryosleep, there will usually be ice crystals forming which destroy the cells.
There are two ways out of this:
1. Use some sort of antifreeze agent to prevent the formation of ice crystals: I have no idea if there is an agent that might work. Most of the ones we already use are toxic. On the other hand there is a frog whose name I can't remember, that goes into hibernation during winter, mostly freezing solid, but it produces its own antifreeze agent.
2. Freeze the body so fast, that there is no time for ice crystals to form: We use this technique to freeze single cells, e.g. for in vitro fertilization. No idea if that can be applied to a whole human body. 50-100kg of meat are thermally pretty inert.
That being said, cryosleep would certainly be more resource-efficient than a generational ship, but it would be even more efficient to only send an in vitro box full of frozen embryos. This should be quite manageable with our current technology. It's challenges are more in the sociology, because the first generation bred from the embryos would have to be raised by some sort of AI. And we're very far away from the level where I'd let a computer raise my children.
Once we develop an AI that's good enough for it, I think the real question will be, why to bother sending fragile organic life at all, and not just an AI. This would also make the search for earth-like planets pretty much obsolete, maybe even the search for planets at all.
There are two ways out of this:
1. Use some sort of antifreeze agent to prevent the formation of ice crystals: I have no idea if there is an agent that might work. Most of the ones we already use are toxic. On the other hand there is a frog whose name I can't remember, that goes into hibernation during winter, mostly freezing solid, but it produces its own antifreeze agent.
2. Freeze the body so fast, that there is no time for ice crystals to form: We use this technique to freeze single cells, e.g. for in vitro fertilization. No idea if that can be applied to a whole human body. 50-100kg of meat are thermally pretty inert.
That being said, cryosleep would certainly be more resource-efficient than a generational ship, but it would be even more efficient to only send an in vitro box full of frozen embryos. This should be quite manageable with our current technology. It's challenges are more in the sociology, because the first generation bred from the embryos would have to be raised by some sort of AI. And we're very far away from the level where I'd let a computer raise my children.
Once we develop an AI that's good enough for it, I think the real question will be, why to bother sending fragile organic life at all, and not just an AI. This would also make the search for earth-like planets pretty much obsolete, maybe even the search for planets at all.
Transhumanist spotted
S
sulu
Guest
I don't like to see myself as a transhumanist. You'll end up with topics like eugenics and technologically induced loss of self-determination pretty quickly.
I think Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had some good points, but I don't like living in their world.
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There MIGHT be a possible solution for that "laser drive" problem. The laser accelerates the craft because it applies a positive radiation pressure to the craft's deflector. So to decelerate the craft, we'd need a way to create a negative radiation pressure. This isn't possible with normal materials, but apparently so called "meta materials" can be configured in a way that would result in a negative radiation pressure. [1][2]
I have no idea if the principle is even applicable to a space craft, but if it is, then the meta material would essentially turn the laser into a "tractor beam" as "SciAm" has called it. [3] So the space craft could have two deflectors. One at the bottom is made of normal material to accelerate the craft, the other one is at the top and consists of the meta material to decelerate the craft. Half-way on the journey the laser emitters could be switched off for a brief period, the craft would turn around and the emitters would be switched on again.
[1] http://meetings.aps.org/Meeting/MAR09/Event/93172
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22513601
[3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bright-idea-new-tractor-beam/
Grench
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We don't get the asteroid from interstellar space. We get it from inside our own solar system and use it as materials. I'm sure the price has come down a lot, but the last I heard it cost $10,000 per pound to put material from Earth into Earth orbit. By placing the conversion/refining equipment in space then using the materials already in space, those material launch costs can be avoided.
As to which one to use - there are a lot of choices. The comet that the Philae lander surveyed would actually be a potential candidate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
It has enough mass and currently has a good amount of momentum. By putting conversion/refining equipment on the object to create the materials to use, the materials and their momentum (read energy) are retained.
For this idea/method, the faster and larger the target object, the better. One of the first things that would need to be constructed are the Ion engines that would slowly change the trajectory and more or less point it at the trailing end of Jupiter or the other gas giants to capture momentum. Idealy it would sling from gas giant to gas giant through the outer planets and around the sun getting faster and faster.
The important concept is that we not only need materials in space, but we need materials in motion in space.
The time scale is immense. It would require generations of time just bringing the object up to speed by flipping it back and forth around the Jovian planets - stealing momentum (gravity assist) with each pass.
A lot could be said of the societal implications both on the 'craft' and back on the hypothetically doomed Earth.
